An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

Introduction

We have seen how Duhem's arguments indicate limitations on how far deductive logic alone can guide us to decisions about scientific theories based on experimental outcomes. In the early decades of the twentieth century, another group of philosophers and scientists on the European continent were pursuing a philosophical program that attempted to exploit the resources of formal logic as far as possible in the articulation of a ‘scientific philosophy.’

In this chapter we will take a brief look at the philosophical movement known as logical empiricism or logical positivism, paying particular attention to a central project of the movement: an account of the structure of scientific theories. The preoccupation of philosophers of science with the question of theory structure has its roots in an underlying commitment – rarely examined or even articulated throughout most of the twentieth century – to the importance of theories as the primary contribution of scientific inquiry to human knowledge. Later, some philosophers challenged this assumption, arguing that experimentation produces knowledge that is philosophically significant beyond simply its role in testing broad explanatory theories (Ackermann, 1985; Franklin, 1986; Hacking, 1983; Mayo, 1996). Nonetheless, the question of theory structure remains highly relevant to our understanding of scientific knowledge, and the fate of logical empiricist views has had important consequences for the subsequent development of philosophy of science, as we will explore in the next several chapters.